Sullivan: Better later than never

The English golfer will be easy to spot at The Masters — he will be the guy with the biggest smile

Andy Sullivan is expected to join Rory McIllroy as a member of Europe’s Ryder Cup team ( David Cannon)

“It’s never too late to be what you might have been” — George Eliot.

GEORGE ELIOT and Andy Sullivan. Theirs is a tenuous enough link. They were
both born in Nuneaton, a West Midlands town that doesn’t exactly take your
breath away. She was born in 1819, her granddad owned the local mill, her
father managed an estate.

He came along 167 years later, the only son of Terence and Susan, who were
both made redundant from the Peugeot factory at Ryton in their 40s. Life
wasn’t easy for the Sullivans but they managed.

And now their only boy is listed among Nuneaton’s most famous people, along
with Eliot. But he’s not making any claims here because kids in
Stockingford, his part of Nuneaton, weren’t obsessed by Middlemarch. If you
wanted to cast Andy Sullivan into the world of literature, he could be only
the Artful Dodger. If you were a